Don't agree that there's a correlation between ego and top universities/hospitals. I've been to a lot of places, including Cedars Sinai, U.S.C. and a neurologist at UCLA here in LA, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester MN, Drexel Univ. College of Medicine in Philadelphia and Johns Hopkins.

Currently, my P.M. is a blessed man who is the chief of Pain Medicine at U.S.C., triple boarded (psychiatry, anesthesiology and pain medicine) and an utterly compassionate human being,

On the other hand, the most egoic man I ever met in my life is a PM doc who left UCLA to set up his own shop; my surmise from what I was told about billing shortly after he left UCLA is that he did so, at least in part, so that he could make more money by refusing to accept insurance reimbursement.

As to the Mayo Clinic and Hopkins, you've got all types. I really think it's a matter of the individual doctor/department. Of course growing up in Rochester, I may have I bias towards the Mayo Clinic, but I have seen wild variations in personality through the years in one department (psychiatry: some adopt an extremely paternalistic approach, some don't) and have found others to be consistently aloof (neurology and unfortunately the Division of Pain Medicine), while receiving consistently compassionate care in other departments, including pulmonology, cardiology, and hematology/oncology.

And finally, I doubt that you would find that there are many patients of Robert J. Schwartzman who would give him bad marks for bedside manners. That said, his operation isn't really set up to provide continuing care to those who don't respond to the experimental treatments he has running, but I don't see that as a matter of ego, just efficiency. (Unlike the PM just out of UCLA who declared that I didn't have RSD - about 14 months after I first became ill, and 2 or 3 months after the blocks stopped working at another hospital. because I didn't respond to HIS block.)

Mike